Some say he was a breakthrough academic and visionary shaman. Others say he was a sham. Either way, Carlos Castaneda shaped a generation of mystical thinkers and magic mushroom eaters. In 1968, at the height of the psychedelic age, Castaneda published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, the first of twelve books describing his apprenticeship to an Indian shaman, and his journeys to the "separate reality" of the sorcerers' worlds. Like Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf and Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, The Teachings of Don Juan and its sequels became essential reading for legions of truth seekers. Castaneda himself became a cult figure-seldom seen, nearly mythological, a cross between Timothy Leary and L. Ron Hubbard: a short, dapper, Buddha-with-an-attitude who likened his own appearance to that of a "Mexican bellhop." Though Castaneda had more than ten million books in print in seventeen languages, he lived in wily anonymity for nearly thirty years, doing his best, in his own words, to become "as inaccessible as possible." Most people figured he had a house somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, where he'd studied with his own teacher, a leathery old Indian brujo named Don Juan Matus. In truth, Castaneda lived and wrote for most of that time in Westwood Village, a neighborhood of students and professors in Los Angeles, not far from UCLA and Beverly Hills. Upon his death in 1998, things became even more murky. A year-long investigation into the mysterious life and impeccable death of Carlos Castaneda, as told by his wife, his adopted son, his mistresses, and his followers.

Shaman: The Mysterious Life and Impeccable Death of Carlos Castaneda

Biographies & Memoirs

Sager, Mike

Arts & Literature

The Sager Group LLC/NeoText

The Rise and Fall of a Super Freak: And Other True Stories of Black Men Who Made History, is a pocket collection of stories, by award-winning journalist Mike Sager, about American Black men whose lives significantly affected the direction and zeitgeist of American culture.\nRick James, known to all as Super Freak, was the first to wear African-inspired braids; his powerful funk beats powered the rollicking 1980s and can still be heard in music today. Sager met music’s King of Funk within the thick granite walls of historic Folsom State Prison, where James was serving the final weeks of a sentence for assault, false imprisonment, and furnishing drugs, the result of two separate crack-fueled incidents. After James left prison, the two men remained friends until the time of James' death.\nEric “Eazy E” Wright was a crack dealer who formed, along with icons Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, the seminal rap group Niggas Wit Attitude. Eazy’s business practices and lifestyle set the bar for hip hop. But in the end, shockingly, he succumbed to AIDS.\nBlack motorist Rodney Glenn King’s videotaped beating, at the hands of Los Angeles police, was a watershed moment in American racial history, focusing massive public attention for the first time on the issue of racially motivated police brutality and the perils of driving while black. King’s sacrifices paved the way for movements like Black Lives Matter and worldwide calls for racial equality. A look at what happened that fateful night, from both inside and outside of King’s vehicle.\nFreeway Rick Ross didn’t invent crack. But he probably did more than anyone else to cause its spread. The way he sees it, Ross was a banker in a shadow economy—an American capitalist in the grand tradition of our country’s rags-to-riches folklore, bringing jobs and riches to his people and himself. How one illiterate man from South Central Los Angeles changed the course of history.\n*With interior art by WBYK.

The Rise and Fall of a Super Freak: And Other True Stories of Black Men Who Made History

Walt Harrington has been one of the most impactful journalists in the modern wave of long-form creative nonfiction. The Detective: And Other True Stories features some of the highlights of Harrington’s long career as an award-winning author, Washington Post Magazine writer, journalism professor/university administrator, and mentor to several generations of writers that have followed him in the practice of his Intimate Journalism, codified in a much-assigned university textbook he wrote to codify his practice and philosophy of the craft.\nOver 30 years, Harrington did scores of profiles of people both famous and obscure. His goal: “To make ordinary people extraordinary and extraordinary people ordinary.” A selection of the best stories in both categories—eight articles—are collected here.\nIn the title piece, Harrington embeds with a homicide detective during the height of the crack and murder epidemic of the 1990s. In “A Narrow World Made Wide,” he embeds in quite a different environment, the writing studio of U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove. From there he takes the reader through the looking glass of the exacting, protracted, ritualized, and intimate process of writing a single poem—becoming in the process a story about the ethereal act of creativity itself.\nOther stories include: a Harvard Law School grad who eschews a big-bucks job to make $24,000 a year trying to save convicted felons from death sentences; the trials and joys of a pair of sisters as they do their best to care for their aged, once-powerful father; an insider’s look at the extraordinary life of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks; a deeply reported profile of the 41st president of the U.S., George Herbert Walker Bush, followed by an account of the unlikely friendship Harrington developed with the 43rd president, George W. Bush, known as Dubya. Finally, Harrington turns his thoughts inward with an essay about his own father and son, and the bridge between the generations.\nEach Harrington story is a precious gem—mined, cut, polished and set by a master craftsman. Like a valuable piece of woodwork or a beautiful song, they stand alone as totems of thought and ideas, artful and full of insight. By chronicling the ordinary lives of the famous and obscure with a hard-eyed compassion, Harrington reveals not only the true natures of his subjects but also the values they hold within the cultures they inhabit. In this way, his stories are as much about his readers as his subjects, a clue to understanding the conditions of others, something that could well serve our divided world of today.

The Detective: And Other True Stories (The Stacks Reader Series)

Harrington, Walt

Community & Culture

Before he became Count Dante, The Deadliest Man Alive . . . 
Before he began training Blacks and women in mixed martial arts and incited the deadly Dojo War in Chicago . . . 
Before he started wearing a cape, carrying a gold cane, and walking his pet lion around the Loop on a leash . . . 
Before he was—or was not — entangled with the Mob . . . 
Before he did—or did not—help organize Chicago’s record-setting Purolator Heist, from which $1.5 million was never recovered . . . 
Before he got hooked on cocaine, became even more bizarre, and died mysteriously . . . 
He was John Keehan, a doctor’s kid from a good family, with a weakness for the girl next door. A certified beautician who owned a hair salon and coiffed the hair of Playboy Bunnies, nobody from high school ever expected he’d end up inside the pages of millions of comic books, selling the infamous secrets to the Dim Mak, The Death Touch, bringing mixed martial arts to the masses.

The Deadliest Man Alive: Count Dante, the Mob, and the War for American Martial Arts

Sports & Outdoors

Feldheim, Benji

Biographies

The Pope of Pot: And Other True Stories of Marijuana and Related High Jinks is a pocket collection, by the award-winning journalist (and former Rolling Stone drugs correspondent) Mike Sager, highlighting his dispatches from the cannabis underground.\nIn “When Should a Man Stop Smoking Weed?” Sager looks back on a half-century of pot-smoking, starting on a humid night in summer at age 12. “Marijuana has served as a great equalizer, a frequent teacher, and a pleasant companion,” he writes, “leading me places I would never have otherwise gone.”\nThe Pope of Pot founded the nation’s first marijuana delivery service in New York City, with a corps of bicycle messengers, all of them covered by a company dental plan. Meet the marijuana pope and his faithful followers at the Church of Realized Fantasies. Too bad the cops didn’t think he was so amusing.\nIn “Dab Artists” we meet the artesian crafters who occupied the outlaw edge of the vaping boom in the early days of legal weed. Cool but nerdy, deliberately unkempt, these self-taught Heisenbergs of hash oil gathered for the Secret Cup Finals in Las Vegas.\nIn “The Pot Doctor Will See You Now,” we meet Don Davidson, MD, a pioneer of online medical marijuana recommendations. Over several years, Dr. D. and his crew of doctors issued hundreds of thousands of weed licenses. A long and jangled day with the hardest working doctor in the marijuana business.\nAnd in “Meeting the Ghost of Christmas Future,” Sager is sent by Rolling Stone to Woody Creek, CO, to aid his colleague, the legendary Hunter S. Thompson. Busted for possession of illegal drugs, HST faces a fifty-year prison sentence. The next three weeks will teach at least one of them lessons to last a lifetime.

The Pope of Pot: And Other True Stories of Marijuana and Related High Jinks

Historical

The Dreamer Deceiver: A True Story About the Trial of Judas Priest for Deadly Subliminal Messaging (The Stacks Reader Series)

Arts & Photography

Solotaroff, Ivan

Music

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Books by The Sager Group LLC/NeoText